Intergenerational Connections In Digital Families

This book provides a comprehensive review of how digital communication technology can help families network and communicate across generations, despite differences in family composition, residential location, cultural values and orientations. Covering the full spectrum of intergenerational relations (including child to parent, and parent to grandparent), it offers a positive view of the value of digital technology usage within families. The author focuses on three European countries: Finland, Italy and Slovenia, but also touches on other European countries and parts of the United States, revealing evidence that challenges ideas of universal adoption of information communication technology (ICT) and consistency in the social effects of such adoption in different regions and cultures. Further, the book discusses numerous other challenges and issues, such as: • the social transformations and technological developments that have made digital families possible; • the resulting changes in family roles, responsibilities, and practices; and • the theoretical and conceptual implications of digital communication-technology use in families. The author illustrates how ICT can facilitate family solidarity and how it helps to provide new ways of being together, and they discuss how social media, particularly instant messaging applications, helps develop affinity between family members better than traditional one-to-one personal communication tools. Combining highly nuanced material with fresh sociological thinking, it enhances readers’ theoretical understanding of the meaning of the ‘digital family’, making it a powerful resource for graduate and undergraduate students, as well as academics. Thanks to its structured format with easy-to-understand explanations, it appeals to practitioners and researchers alike.

Are Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) connecting families? And what does this mean in terms of family routines, relationships, norms, work, intimacy and privacy? This edited collection takes a life course and generational perspective covering theory, including posthumanism and strong structuration theory, and methodology, including digital and cross-disciplinary methods. It presents a series of case studies on topics such as intergenerational connections, work-life balance, transnational families, digital storytelling and mobile parenting. It will give students, researchers and practitioners a variety of tools to make sense of how ICTs are used, appropriated and domesticated in family life. These tools allow for an informed and critical understanding of ICTs and family dynamics.

Understand how multigenerational family relationships can benefit all generations! Intergenerational Relationships: Conversations on Practice and Research Across Cultures focuses on how family and community relationships are affected by pressing social problems. Respected international authorities reveal how cultures from Africa, Asia, the US, and Europe value connections among people of different ages and how these relationships are used to address crucial social problems. Insightful research bridges multiple disciplines to provide a unique perspective demonstrating the benefits of intergenerational relationships. Intergenerational Relationships: Conversations on Practice and Research Across Cultures presents a variety of approaches to social and intergenerational issues from international authors. The book discusses issues in two intergenerational categories: relationships in families and relationships in communities. The diverse range of content presents an enlightened view of the transformation of societies by modern technologies and illustrates the importance of maintaining a firm cultural identity through the relationships of different age groups. The view that the interdependence of multiple generations and society's common goals are inseparable is discussed in papers that explore rites of passage, language transfer, art and literature, community events, and research. Intergenerational Relationships: Conversations on Practice and Research Across Cultures explores: the devastation of intergenerational relationships in Nigeria because of AIDS intergenerational cultural transmission among the Akan of Ghana African views of elders in folklore and literature transitional changes in contemporary intergenerational relationships in India the construction of future theories of intergenerational relationships intergenerational initiatives in Sweden faith-based health and wellness programs in the US intergenerational relationships in US communities relationships between differing age groups among the Tumbuka of northern Malawi transformations over time in generational relationships in Africa intergenerational developments in England Intergenerational Relationships: Conversations on Practice and Research Across Cultures is an important text for educators and students in intergenerational studies; researchers delving into intergenerational relationships, cultural transfer, and social change; international policymakers; and interdisciplinary scholars in developmental psychology, education, gerontology, sociology, and political science.

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It explores the rise of self-tracking, quantified self and informal practices of care at distance as part of contemporary household dynamics.

An increasingly important field of research within multilingualism and sociolinguistics, Family Language Policy (FLP) investigates the explicit and overt planning of language use within the home and among family members. However the diverse range of different family units and contexts around the globe necessitates a similarly diverse range of research perspectives which are not yet represented within the field. Tackling this problem head on, this volume expands the scope of families in FLP research. Bringing together contributors and case studies from every continent, this essential reference broadens lines of inquiry by investigating language practices and ideologies in previously under-researched families. Seeking to better reflect contemporary influences on FLP processes, chapters use innovative methodologies, including digital ethnographies and autoethnography, to explore diverse family configurations (adoptive, LGBTQ+, and single parent), modalities (digital communication and signed languages), and speakers and contexts (adult learners, Indigenous contexts, and new speakers). Bringing to light the dynamic, fluid nature of family and kinship as well as the important role that multilingualism plays in family members' negotiation of power, agency, and identity construction, Diversifying Family Language Policy is a state-of-the-art reference to contemporary theoretical, methodological and ethical advances in the field of family language policy.

This book studies the many different ways in which the lives of the first, third, and fourth generations intersect and the reciprocal benefits that can accrue from establishing positive intergenerational bonds. The unifying feature across the chapters is that the authors view these relationships as a powerful influence on Quality of Life (QoL). The book takes the stance that older adults figure prominently in the QoL of young children, with the latter group defined here as ranging in age from infancy up to and including eight years of age. It examines how bonds with older adults can affect young children’s functioning across developmental domains—physical, emotional, social, and cognitive. It addresses questions of importance to those who have a commitment to the very young such as: “What benefits can young children derive from positive bonds with older adults?”, “How do young children understand the aging process and develop respect for the elderly?”, “How can published research be used to guide both informal and formal interactions between the older generation and the newest one?” and, finally, “How can various stakeholders such as professionals, families, organizations, and communities collaborate to enrich and enlarge the kind and amount of support that older adults provide to the very young child?”

Communicating with Our Families: Continuity, Interruption, and Transformation examines how communication technologies are shaping childhood, parenthood, and families by exploring topics such as parental loneliness, family storytelling, family technology rules, mindful technology usage, multigenerational communication, and community. The scholars in this volume work from a human communication perspective and use various research modes of inquiry including quantitative, qualitative, and interpretive methods. Perhaps the most significant question implied by our contributors in this volume is whether the introduction of new communication technologies will fundamentally alter familial forms and if those new groupings that emerge will resemble what has been generally assumed for several millennia.